There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something s...o soothing and special, too.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I see young men doing so wonderfully well in athletics, I don't feel angry at them. I feel jealous of them. I wish that some ...of my boys in writing would do the same thing.... You must have form--performance. The thing itself is indescribable, but it is felt like athletic form. To have form, feel form in sports--and by analogy feel form in verse. One works and waits for form in both. As I said, the person who spends his time criticizing the play around him will never write poetry. He will write criticism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I shall speak of ... how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another.... Of the revulsion that foll...ows one insight and precedes the next.... Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable, Nature.... It is difficult to conceive of a ...region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,--to be the dwelling of man, we say,--so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,--not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,--no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there,--the home this, of Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,--to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You ask if there is no doctrine of sorrow in my philosophy. Of acute sorrow I suppose that I know comparatively little. My saddest... and most genuine sorrows are apt to be but transient regrets. The place of sorrow is supplied, perchance, by a certain hard and proportionately barren indifference. I am of kin to the sod, and partake of its dull patience,--in winter expecting the sun of spring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"next to of course god america i love you land of the pilgrims" and so forth oh... say can you see by the dawn's early my country 'tis of centuries come and go and are no more what of it we should worry in every language even deafanddumb thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry by jing by gee by gosh by gumLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the next war will be a war in which people not armies will suffer, and our boasted, hard-earned civilization will do us no goo...d. Cannot the women rise to this great opportunity and work now, and not have the double horror, if another war comes, of losing their loved ones, and knowing that they lifted no finger when they might have worked hard?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"To me it seems a shocking idea. I despise and loathe myself, and yet you thrust self at me from every corner of the church as tho...ugh I loved and admired it. All religion does nothing but pursue me with self even into the next world."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine tha...t our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Supposing the Mechanical Phase to have lasted 300 years, from 1600 to 1900, the next or Electric Phase would have a life equal to ...(the square root of 300), or about seventeen years and a half, when--that is, in 1917Mit would pass into another or Ethereal Phase, which, for half a century, science has been promising, and which would last only (the square root of 17.5), or about four years, and bring Thought to the limit of its possibilities in the year 1921. It may well be!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »